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Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in th

by jzwinck 12y ago

Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9% confidence level"). The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-selected) female from a community which has a large male majority. Most people in the world are heterosexual, and in my opinion people are more likely to sexually harass the gender they "like." Let's say 3/4 of people are straight and 1/4 are gay. Let's also say that 2/3 of sexual harassment is directed at the "preferred" gender" of the perpetrator. Imagine a population of 80 boys and 8 girls, all equally "good." Half of them never say a bad thing to anyone. The other half lash out once a month and say something disgusting. Now, we have 60 straight boys, 30 of whom behave badly once a month. That's 30 nasty messages a month, 20 of which go to girls and 10 to boys. We also have 20 gay boys generating 10 nastygrams monthly, 7 to boys and 3 to girls. As for the girls, there are 6 straight ones, 3 of whom are bad, so they send 2 threatening topics to boys and 1 to a girl each month. Of the 2 gay girls only one is malfeasant, so let's say she sends her only "love letter" to a girl. How many total bad messages are sent each month? 20 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 25 to girls, and 10 + 7 + 2 + 0 = 19 to boys. With 80 total boys, each will receive about one salacious message per four months. But each of the 8 girls will absorb, on average, just over 3 per month. I tried to use conservative numbers here, and still the girls in a male-majority group get 13 times as many unwanted notes as boys. This is deplorable, but it is also unsurprising given the population.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rtpg 12y ago
I think the question here is "will gamers harass men or women more". In this case you want your community to be representative of the community at large, so this gender imbalance makes sense. Your point makes sense, but seems irrelevant to the discussion here.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  I think it's exactly to the point: the question is if we have a fundamentally more sexist male population online than female population, or if we're seeing confounding variables introducing an apparently difference. I mean, there's clearly a problem with the experience women have with many online communities - just ask them, they're not shy about admitting it. The hard questions are why is their experience like that and what are the main contributing causes. In fact, the last time we had a discussion about sexism here, someone posted a study to me claiming that it's often confounding community values that create a hotbed of apparent sexism.[1] So if we're talking about the situation where what we see is a normal (and consistent at large with society) rate of men harassing women, we should be asking what we can do to fix the other parts of the community that enable these people to be unduly felt, such as not properly spam filtering messages between users. Why is it, for instance, I can tell my email client to never display a message with the word 'cunt' in it, except for whitelisted users, but I can't do this when trying to interact with people in public, such as reddit or Kongregate? I believe what we see time and again when we analyze the numbers is not that we're seeing an inherently higher rate of sexism, to which we need to do something to fix the attitudes of men in general, but rather that we're seeing the undue influence of the usual rate of problematic actors - that is, it's way easier to bother a lot of people as a troll and dominate the conversation online than in person, and its this difference that is the cause of the problems, not the background rate of problematic actors. [1] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...
  - rtpg 12y ago
    There is no discussion about the difference between male aggressors and female aggressors (though the examples were all male I imagine). The question is about aggressors in the gaming community as a whole,e ven if this is "just" a consequence of there being more men than women in the community, it's still an issue . The question in the test was "is it easier to be a man or a women in the gaming community?", not "why". I agree that this doesn't answer the why, but I think it answer the initial question.
    - deleted 12y ago
raquo 12y ago
That's good statistics, and probably explains generic nastygram data quite well. However, my non-data-backed bet is that males are much more likely to send sexually harassing messages than females, so even in an environment with 50% males and 50% females, females will get much more sexual nastygrams than males.
- verroq 12y ago
  You also need to account for technical ability. There's way more technical male users who know how not only to harass, but to get away with it. On sites like Facebook where it's tied to a real life identity, I'd expect to see harassment drop significantly.
  - silencio 12y ago
    Identities don't change anything. I don't know what the solution is, but that's not it. My current, occasional stalker - someone in the tech industry, a fellow dev, someone probably reading HN, even - gave away his name, phone, address... and it checks out. Police won't take him as a serious threat though, so neither will anyone else (like Twitter). Police also won't just check on him because I think he's schizophrenic from the very weird things he has sent me in the past. I just block him everywhere after the fact and hope that he has family/friends that will eventually check on him. My last favorite game I stopped playing because people were harassing me, people that were easily tied to their FB accounts with their full name, employer, address, and more. They didn't give a shit. Neither did Blizzard. No care about rape threats. Okay. I'm done. I'm also super disillusioned given what some people I know in this industry are saying about GG. They don't care that their real name and sometimes their employer is on their Twitter profile, even if they harass people with it. And of course, brace myself for the "but that was out of bounds and evil!", the handful of folks I can remember that have been fired for harassment on twitter - all happened because they had a real name+employer written down somewhere, and they thought they would get away with it. Not to mention I'm really glad I'm out of the dating market because my okc and other dating site inboxes were cesspools. Again, real names or more than enough info to tie a person to their real name, and still they persist. I had the courtesy to reply to every message that wasn't some variation on "wanna suck my %&#$"/"your hot"/"i wanna do _____ to you" and yet some people still ended up going "you're a bitch"/"you're so fat i feel sorry for you i bet you don't get laid"/(rape threats). I only wish real life identities were a deterrent, but that only happens if there are consequences. Given what's going on, apparently there are no consequences except in the oddest direction ever (with all the doxxing going on).

by jzwinck 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rtpg 12y ago

I think the question here is "will gamers harass men or women more". In this case you want your community to be representative of the community at large, so this gender imbalance makes sense. Your point makes sense, but seems irrelevant to the discussion here.

ObviousScience 12y ago
I think it's exactly to the point: the question is if we have a fundamentally more sexist male population online than female population, or if we're seeing confounding variables introducing an apparently difference. I mean, there's clearly a problem with the experience women have with many online communities - just ask them, they're not shy about admitting it. The hard questions are why is their experience like that and what are the main contributing causes. In fact, the last time we had a discussion about sexism here, someone posted a study to me claiming that it's often confounding community values that create a hotbed of apparent sexism.[1] So if we're talking about the situation where what we see is a normal (and consistent at large with society) rate of men harassing women, we should be asking what we can do to fix the other parts of the community that enable these people to be unduly felt, such as not properly spam filtering messages between users. Why is it, for instance, I can tell my email client to never display a message with the word 'cunt' in it, except for whitelisted users, but I can't do this when trying to interact with people in public, such as reddit or Kongregate? I believe what we see time and again when we analyze the numbers is not that we're seeing an inherently higher rate of sexism, to which we need to do something to fix the attitudes of men in general, but rather that we're seeing the undue influence of the usual rate of problematic actors - that is, it's way easier to bother a lot of people as a troll and dominate the conversation online than in person, and its this difference that is the cause of the problems, not the background rate of problematic actors. [1] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/3381 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...
- rtpg 12y ago
  There is no discussion about the difference between male aggressors and female aggressors (though the examples were all male I imagine). The question is about aggressors in the gaming community as a whole,e ven if this is "just" a consequence of there being more men than women in the community, it's still an issue . The question in the test was "is it easier to be a man or a women in the gaming community?", not "why". I agree that this doesn't answer the why, but I think it answer the initial question.
  - deleted 12y ago

raquo 12y ago

That's good statistics, and probably explains generic nastygram data quite well. However, my non-data-backed bet is that males are much more likely to send sexually harassing messages than females, so even in an environment with 50% males and 50% females, females will get much more sexual nastygrams than males.

verroq 12y ago
You also need to account for technical ability. There's way more technical male users who know how not only to harass, but to get away with it. On sites like Facebook where it's tied to a real life identity, I'd expect to see harassment drop significantly.
- silencio 12y ago
  Identities don't change anything. I don't know what the solution is, but that's not it. My current, occasional stalker - someone in the tech industry, a fellow dev, someone probably reading HN, even - gave away his name, phone, address... and it checks out. Police won't take him as a serious threat though, so neither will anyone else (like Twitter). Police also won't just check on him because I think he's schizophrenic from the very weird things he has sent me in the past. I just block him everywhere after the fact and hope that he has family/friends that will eventually check on him. My last favorite game I stopped playing because people were harassing me, people that were easily tied to their FB accounts with their full name, employer, address, and more. They didn't give a shit. Neither did Blizzard. No care about rape threats. Okay. I'm done. I'm also super disillusioned given what some people I know in this industry are saying about GG. They don't care that their real name and sometimes their employer is on their Twitter profile, even if they harass people with it. And of course, brace myself for the "but that was out of bounds and evil!", the handful of folks I can remember that have been fired for harassment on twitter - all happened because they had a real name+employer written down somewhere, and they thought they would get away with it. Not to mention I'm really glad I'm out of the dating market because my okc and other dating site inboxes were cesspools. Again, real names or more than enough info to tie a person to their real name, and still they persist. I had the courtesy to reply to every message that wasn't some variation on "wanna suck my %&#$"/"your hot"/"i wanna do _____ to you" and yet some people still ended up going "you're a bitch"/"you're so fat i feel sorry for you i bet you don't get laid"/(rape threats). I only wish real life identities were a deterrent, but that only happens if there are consequences. Given what's going on, apparently there are no consequences except in the oddest direction ever (with all the doxxing going on).